An anticook dishes out
The vegans are coming for Christmas dinner. I'm not scared.
I'm Irish. Serving dinner to anyone with taste buds is intimidating enough. Why should my nephew and his friend who eschew animal products be any particular challenge? The way I see it, having vegan guests eliminates one entire course for me to ruin.
It's not so much that I can't cook than that I don't cook. Busy, busy, busy. That's what I tell myself, anyway, until the Yuletide rolls around and my near and dear ones assemble around my linen-draped rented tables. I am something of a mythological figure in my family, the anti-cook in a clan of terrible cooks.
Why they come back every year, frankly, is a far more interesting question than why I don't simply take a cooking class.
The appetizer course (mini-quiche from BJ's frozen food section, cheese straws from the William Sonoma catalogue) invariably includes a recounting of the year that I forgot to turn on the oven and we carved the turkey either by moonlight or the rising sun.
No one remembers with any real clarity. (I did mention that we're Irish, didn't I?)
By the salad course, the teenagers are recalling the year that I left the paper-wrapped giblets inside the bird. The turkey was salvaged, but I definitely lost points with the kindergartner who had toured the town fire station the month before. ("What do you mean we don't own a kitchen fire extinguisher?") How do you explain to a 5-year-old that it seemed like an extravagence for a woman on such close terms with the pizza deliveryman?
Give me points for effort, though. I've been to the Whole Foods Market. (Does the name imply that my regular grocery store is selling me half foods, I could not help but wonder?) I've seen the bins of mung beans, lotus root, lemongrass and yucca. I've spied the refrigerated tubs of seitan. I fled in the face of my own ignorance. Who wouldn't, in the midst of shoppers who have no need to tap the shoulder of an earnest young saleswoman with multiple piercings to ask, "Excuse me, dear, but what exactly is miso?"
That was yesterday, the eve of Christmas Eve. Ancient history. Then, I was frightened, alone, on an impossible mission. Today, I will return, triumphant, armed with a shopping list culled from Myra Kornfeld's "The Voluptuous Vegan," a cookbook that has the good grace to include a glossary for the well-intentioned but uninitiated. I mean, how many people who read "shoyu" in a recipe are not inclined to react as I did: "I'll show you!"
I looked it up, just like the good nuns taught me. "Shoyu: Naturally brewed all-purpose high quality soy sauce, fomented solely from whole soybeans, salt water and wheat koji." Oh, that's a help! Koji? Don't you just love a definition that includes another mysterious word? "Cooked rice, barley or soybeans inoculated with Aspergillus culture," the glossary says. Inoculated? I, for one, am not going to ask how an injection qualifies a food as "natural" or "whole." I am a student, not a cynic.
My nephew is also my godson, the young man I promised to guide spiritually as he made his way through life. As so often happens, it is the child who is the guide, not the adult. Here is what I read in Kornfeld's cookbook as I prepared a meal to welcome two vegans to our family's Christmas celebration: "A person who thinks about satisfying his soul is likely to feel more nourished and healthy than someone who treats nourishment as a technical problem. Cooking is one of the most basic forms of nurturing -- a deeply grounding experience, an active, meditative immersion in nature. It is a means of getting in touch with the rhythms, cycles and the world around us."
Enough to make a person want to learn to cook, especially at Christmas.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
